I’ve spent the past few hours trying to navigate my way through Music Beta and ended up finding new frustrations at nearly every turn. Music Beta in its current form is far from what we’d expect from a Google product— it’s a web of confusing programs without a lot of instruction as to how to actually get to the music you want to hear.

Beyond that, it’s a pretty vanilla music app. It’s easy to sort by artist, genre, album, song, playlist and „New and Recent,“ and the search function worked shockingly well — even while parsing cloud tracks. It’s decently easy to select albums or songs for offline storage; just hit the arrow dropdown beside either and select the Pin beside „Available offline.“ Choosing the „Shop for artist“ option, as we mentioned before, simply redirects you to Google.com, tossing you out of the Music app entirely and leaving a pretty puzzled look on your face while your browser loads.

After the novelty of the announcement wore off, we soon realized just how close Google was to creating our ideal streaming solution. Imagine if Music Beta could scan your iTunes library for tracks that you already own, and then ping a record label’s servers to stream a song rather than forcing you to upload things first. What a lovely setup that’d be. Trouble is, labels won’t ever allow it, as there’s no feasible way to see if every track in your iTunes library was indeed procured via legal means. Was this type of dream scenario what Google had in mind just weeks ago? That’s a question we may never truly know the answer to, but we have to hold out hope that the company will keep pushing for such an arrangement.

To make up for its missing „store“ component, Google is enticing users with features instead. The new service offers things like automatic playlist creation tools and, perhaps more importantly, more free storage. During its initial phase, Google offers beta customers the ability to store up to 20,000 songs for no charge. Google is measuring storage prices in „songs,“ not GB, for what it’s worth. Regardless, Google is offering roughly 10 times the amount of storage as Amazon does, and for free. That’s a compelling advantage, and one Google can easily afford. Unfortunately, this „free“ option is only available „for a limited time,“ says Google.